Unfrozen
by Savendia
Summary: It is hard to find your way back to apathy once you have helped brush the dust out of another’s metaphorical closet


Um... Don't ask me where I got this from. I have no idea. I honestly don't know how it happened, one day I was sitting in front of my computer and a few days later I come back and there's this little vignette typed out.

It's really about Jack and Daniel, set either really early season one or the movie (though I haven't seen the original Stargate movie, so I don't know if it belongs there). There are no actual spoilers, it just goes after the first time Jack saved Daniel's life, wherever that is. It may not even be in the show, maybe it's an imaginary battle on an early mission we never got to see... Whatever. Put it where you want it.

Disclaimer: I love them, but it seems love just isn't enough... ;D

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Things change when you save someone's life. It is easy to be cold, diffident, aloof, even casually cruel to someone who doesn't matter. It is easy to convince yourself not to care; it is easy to not care about someone with whom you share nothing. Not an interest, not a joke, not a passing word in conversation.

It is not so easy to keep that cold boundary when you share a debt. The moment has passed, but it remains caught in your mind, a television showing an odd set of reruns where the end is different every time. If you had only done something different, if he had done something different, if Fate had other plans… It could be a grave you are standing on. It could be a grave he is standing on, with you doing no more standing at all.

The debt is a responsibility that has already passed but somehow remains. The feeling remains of that split second when you realize you have the power to bring a life to its end. And you don't. You had the power and you gave it up.

It is a heady feeling, a spinning, eternal curiosity, a wonder, a… regret. You had the chance to alter the world forever and you didn't take it.

The regret is a guilt you cannot shake. It unfolds anew when you see him, because you should not regret saving his life. You don't regret it, and so there is a confusion to add to the guilt. You are guilty for feeling a regret you do not truly feel. It is enough to drive any man to the edge.

You are intimately familiar with the edge. You have spent your life on the edge – and perhaps, too, this is part of the regret. If he had died, he would in effect be safe on sturdy ground. A ghost cannot exactly fall any farther, after all. By saving his life you have dragged him to the edge with you. He is innocent, naïve, clueless and clumsy. A clumsy person might fall from the edge, and he, with all his other traits, might well cheerfully trot off of it because he saw something shiny on the ground below.

And he would have no clue what he had done until he was falling, and there you are leaping after him because you didn't save his life once to see him toss it away on a whim.

That is the responsibility – with one, thoughtless action you have doomed yourself to a lifetime of worry over the fate of a man who is far too likely to drop himself thoughtlessly into the same situations again and again.

Despite this, all you regret is the regret.

Things change when you save someone's life. It is a measure of your own worth in the world. If nothing else, you have done this much good, at least. If you put no other good back into the world, this is good. If you fail at everything else you do, this, at least, was a success. This shy, worried, smiling creature floating in a puddle of excessive compassion, he can do good for you. That's one responsibility vanquished, if replaced.

It doesn't matter so much now that you have different interests, different tastes, and different lives. Shared blood is a powerful connection, and you shed enough of it together to be reasonably sure some mingled and stayed.

The moment plays out again, brokenly, for both of you. Over and over – and this is shared too. It is not so hard for you. You shove it away and move on because you've done it before. Another skeleton for the full closet makes little impact, not like the shock of opening that door to find fresh bones strewn around a room you had always expected to be clean, except, perhaps, for the dust.

But then, perhaps that room was not so clean as it first appeared. There is shock in the finding of old bones, too. Bones so thick with dust and deserted cobwebs that you could draw patterns on them with your finger, like the fog on a window in a warm room. But fog only forms when the air outside is cold, and when the air warms the fog is gone. The view is clear again.

Things change when you save someone's life. It is hard to find your way back to apathy once you have helped brush the dust out of another's metaphorical closet. Closets are intimate places, full of old oddments, fragments of memories, dull, frosty shards of a life lived in a room of illusionary warmth. The naïveté, the innocence, it is all a defense from the truth that the room is cold, the outside is cold, and the window is perfectly clear. The view is stark and similar and there is nothing in which to paint rosy fantasies of love and warmth.

Though he has his life, it is a frozen one. You didn't care before, but then, you didn't know. In your own thawing mind, dangerous feelings begin to emerge. Feelings like caring, like protectiveness.

And from somewhere, a desire to bring him in out of the cold.

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If you didn't guess from the story or my little intro at the top, it was from Jack's perspective, thinking about our darling archeologist.

... Did you like it? Did you hate it? Either way, I'll love you if you review! Virtual cookies for all! :D


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